Marmite

It can’t have escaped your notice that there’s no such thing as an accident or bad luck any more. Someone else is always to blame. Everyone is responsible except the ‘victim’. They just want the right to be compensated, even by themselves through their own taxes. Daft, eh? 

I’ve gone on record saying that, post Boris, I have no one to vote for. Sunak is a lying, back-stabbing, out-of-touch, closet rejoiner, and while some of the alternative right-of-centre parties look good at first blush, some of their off-the-cuff pronouncements raise my eyebrows, and some of their supporters raise my hackles. So I have been politically homeless, but that might be about to change.

Kate Middleton impersonating a blade of grass at Wimbledon last week put me off watching the tennis finals. I’m not too struck on champion Vondrousova’s tattoos either. It’s not as if they’re brilliantly executed – she looks like she’s stumbled through a disintegrating ink-smothered spider’s web.  A proper witch who annoyed me this week was Carol Vorderman; she took a cheap Twitter-shot at Johnny Mercer MP (Con) and his wife Felicity (more about her later) for not having university degrees. Did I say cheap? I mean tawdry. 

Here we go again. The food police, in the guise of insufferable sanctimonious pseudo-celebrity and 15-minute-meal-fraudster Jamie Oliver, and war criminal Tony Blair, are headlined in the Times , pushing for salt and sugar (S&S) taxes to solve the health crisis. The obvious objection to the proposals is that they come from two egomaniacs with no democratic mandate or sufficient knowledge about diet and economics. Oliver is only a celebrity chef, and a failed restauranteur, not a busy housewife, dietician or economist. Blair’s just Blah. Oliver’s recipes rely on too many ingredients, most not that popular with many UK households, and too many steps. I’m a wham-bam-thank-you-man kinda cook. And delicious with it: the meals that is, not me. Oliver’s never going to get people to cook from scratch if they’ve got to get used to lots of unfamiliar ingredients. 

With apologies to Robert Burns. It seemed like a simple-enough plan: drive to a South Yorkshire Premier Inn on Wednesday afternoon, drive Sis early Thursday morning to hospital for a major procedure and week-long stay, drive back to her flat, do some cleaning, tidying and pack some things for her eight-week convalescence with us, post a letter through all her neighbours’ doors saying someone had better take over the management company or Project Fear would kick in. Yes I realise that the majority of Northerners didn’t fall for the Remoaner Project Fear claptrap, but I know what buttons to press in the North. While waiting for my phone to jump out of my back pocket with multiple volunteers (ever the optimist), I’d find all the relevant paperwork in Sis’s flat in readiness for the handover. What could possibly go wrong?